Ireland survives the force de frappe

There are several questions arising from Jacques Chirac's bizarre tirade about British food yesterday. Indicative of his low standing even in France, Libération rushed to print his overheard quips to Gerhard Schroeder and Pootie-Poot in Kaliningrad (Konigsberg). So was he talking about haggis when he complained that he been asked by ex-Nato chief George Robertson to sample "an unappetising Scottish dish?" And what exactly does he have against the Finns:

"You cannot trust people [Britain] who have such bad cuisine. It is the country with the worst food after Finland"

One other question: will The Sun use any excuse to run a picture of Nigella Lawson? But anyway, back to the title of our post. The miracle is that Ireland escaped Chirac's wrath. Because, let's face it, Irish cuisine is like British, only worse. Now it had some redeeming features, but these are provided by the home-cooked dinners with fresh ingredients that your mammy made. It's not what you were getting when you risked a restaurant.

Now Yes, things have gotten better. In fact our first reaction on seeing the Irish Times (subs. req'd) list of 100 best restaurants in the country from Saturday's paper was: they managed to find 100? And yes, there are a few treasures doing excellent work with local ingredients. But by and large, you're getting expensive and fussy replications of what other countries do much more easily. And regarding Chirac's central complaint, Ireland seems to have indigenous mad cow disease, just like Britain.

So there are three possibilities explaining our escape. One is that Chirac's reference point is the food served at summits, but it's hard to see how Ireland and Britain differ much in that regard. Another is that Irish food was included in his diatribe, in the manner of things Irish and British often confused by the French state, as reported by the Irish Times last week. Finally, there is what Dubya calls, in a different context, the soft bigotry of low expectations: the Irish Republic is just another of those offshore tax and financial havens, with better food than competitors like, say, Bermuda.